I’m still piloting QF and so far so good except that, like others, I unexpectedly find myself over the 1000 mark so into payment territory. Not a massive issue except that mine is a very small business so I’m quite surprised. I’m wondering if I could be more efficient, especially around entering purchases paid for by credit card.

This is what I’m doing:

I am registering each credit card transaction as a Purchase and manually checking these off against the credit card statement each month.

I then bulk tag these Purchases and ‘pay’ them from the Joint Credit Card (bank) account. I press the radar button to indicate that I want to ‘allocate individual payments corresponding to the invoice date’. This seems to replicate each transaction in the Joint Credit Card account as well; is this why the number of nominal ledger transactions are as high as they are? Should I simply select the ‘allocate one lump sum’ instead? I am guessing that this will reduce significantly the number of accounting transactions.

Also - and/or alternatively - should I enter each purchase in the Joint Credit Card account and NOT in the Purchases account? Then pay by lump sum. Again, I am guessing this will reduce the total number of nominal transactions.

I quickly ran into the transaction limit (or was rapidly approaching it). I just paid the 45 quid: it was cheaper than my time for trying to work out how to reduce entries (and no, I don’t work for QF!) and frankly it’s a steal for that price.

Each purchase invoice is at least two nominal entries for the purchase itself (three if it involves vat) and another two for the payment, so it adds up faster than you think. If you don’t separate purchases by supplier (so you just record everything as coming from the same “dummy” supplier) then it would be theoretically possible to just record one bulk payment against them all, reducing it to two entries per purchase rather than four, but to be honest you’re probably better off just paying the subscription - which is dirt cheap compared to the likes of Xero or QuickBooks - and recording things properly.

The bulk recording approach means your QuickFile view will match the totals from your statement but not the detail, and all purchases will appear to have been paid on the last day of the month rather than when they were actually paid. You have to lump everything into a single supplier (because QuickFile can’t split a single payment across multiple suppliers) which makes it harder to locate specific purchases if you need to later on, and you don’t get an overview of what you owe to each supplier.

Thanks both, your comments are helpful and much appreciated. I am pretty much where you are in that the subscription is worth it rather than investing loads of time uselessly trying to minimise the number of transactions. Blame it on being a newby and having clearly forgotten much of my double-entry from years ago.